reviews 14+Secondary/Adult continued


was a political journalist, intent on exposing corruption and murdered by the government


as a result.


Tanyaradzwa is fighting to survive the aggressive cancer which threatens to take her life. The two girls meet in a private


boarding school which is used by the author as a microcosm of the country’s


ills, thus making them


both personal and national. Shamiso seeks to isolate herself in order to protect her identity but Tanyaradzwa’s determination to forge a friendship between them slowly breaks down Shamiso’s reserve, opening her again to the compassion and empathy which she had banished from her life after the death of her father. There is a real attempt to introduce


the reader to the political dysfunction in Zimbabwe, as Shamiso realises that her father’s friend Jonathan is taking up the baton which her father carried. He succeeds in exposing the government but loses his life in the process. However, this germinates a seed of hope in the narrative-others will fight on to see justice done and some of them will succeed. This is paralled by Tanyaradzwa’s struggles as she survive a dangerous operation to remove the cancer which is about to kill her. There is much to admire in this


book-there is sometimes a rawness in the written style as Tavengerwei strives for poetic imagery which does not always work. The narrative line is often choppy and perhaps more careful editorial shaping would benefit what must surely be a second book from this new author. VR


Child I HHHH


Steve Tasane, Faber & Faber, 186pp, 978 0 571 33783 5, £6.99 pbk


A chewed apple-core, thrown away into a rubbish bin by a Guard – that’s a present to treasure on your tenth birthday. A single white stork’s feather, saved from the sludge and stink of the Camp, is beyond price; you can tuck a feather behind your ear, tickle someone under the chin with it, dream of using it as a quill pen. If you own nothing, you make the most of what you can find. The children in Steve Tasane’s refugee camp do just that. They have no parents, no home but a rickety wooden shack, no regular


food. There is no room


for more than a few children each day at the Camp school, where they can’t understand the language of instruction anyway. They have no documents, no passports, no names. The Guards identify the children by letters. Child E and his sister, Child L, are the friends of our narrator, Child I – the boy who found the apple-core. They share the hut – until it’s bull- dozed into the mud. The new Youth Club, built by volunteers, is flattened too. “For your own good,” they are told. Conditions are a danger to


health, a threat to life. Refugees can’t fight Guards armed with clubs, rubber bullets, tear gas and water bazookas. E and L lose their only link to their past and their family – a photo album – as the wreckage of their shed is churned into the mud. Tasane makes no attempt to locate


his Camp in a specific place. We are not somewhere like the razor-wired reception coast


centre on the of Australia, crowded long-term Rohinga refugees


northern with from


Myanmar in Zana Fraillon’s The Bone Sparrow. We don’t witness anything like the shipwreck and drowning of refugees from Ghana as they attempt to cross the Med. to Spain in Yaba Badoe’s A Jigsaw of Fire and Stars. As a consequence, Child I gains in universality


to become more of a


fable than a novel drawing directly on contemporary wars or politics; Tasane’s


choice means there are


losses too, for a real-world context makes for convincing and horrifying reading when we can see it echoed on TV news bulletins. Tasane insists, though, that “all


the events described in this story are real events which have happened to real children in real camps across the world, in recent months” – though his optimistic conclusion in which an aid worker (named Charity) drives a double-decker bus crowded with children through a gap in the Camp’s fence to take a road which is “always going forward” sadly doesn’t read like a plausible factual event in those real- world camps. Tasane might well say that something like this did happen – but it’s hard for an informed reader to credit. In an afterword (which is expanded in information supplied to reviewers), he tells us that his impulse to write this short book (around 20,000 words, attractively spaced on the page) was very personal. He is the son of a refugee, his father having fled from Estonia after World War II. When Tasane was only 4, his father left his wife and their four sons. Tasane has never forgotten the sense of life being broken – his home, his cultural identity. He defined himself as a boy who had free school meals, sneered at by his fellow pupils. His “shattered upbringing” now prompts his empathy with the broken lives of young refugee children. He is clearly moved not only by the suffering, but also – despite everything - the creativity, the need to belong, to be nurtured, the longing to laugh and play. Above all, the generosity and compassion these children show towards each other. Such are the qualities which may well remain in the thoughts of readers of Child I. GF


A Sky Painted Gold HHHHH


Laura Wood, Scholastic, 385pp, 9781407180205,£7.99 pbk


This is a wonderful evocation of the latter end of the ‘Roaring twenties’. A period when Art Deco was the height of fashion, girls bobbed their hair and those who could afford it partied until they dropped. Life for Lou Trevelyan is very different from this; she lives with her large family on a Cornish farm and the most exciting event on the horizon is her sister Alice’s wedding.


Lou’s


favourite activity is to swim out to the nearby island and wander around the large Cardew mansion, which has been empty for several years and relish being alone. Then one day the owner Robert Cardew and his sister Caitlin arrive, complete with a large house party of ‘bright young things’. Lou gradually gets drawn into this glamourous lifestyle and this causes friction with her sister Alice; however she soon finds that there are some very dark undercurrents to the lifestyle she


sees and life becomes very


complex. Added to this is her growing attraction to Robert, who is only in his early twenties and yet seems a world away in his sophistication. This turns out to be a summer that Lou will never forget. I started this book with some trepidation, because I had enjoyed Laura’s books for younger readers, but I have to say that she has surpassed herself with this story.


It is


truly magical in the way it transports us back to that golden period between the wars,


before the It is a story about depression


and the threat from Germany began to rear its head.


family in its different forms and about the fragility of the human spirit, but it is also about our ability to overcome adversity and forge a new path. The characters face many challenges, from racism and gay relationships to mental health and financial issues, but they find that real friendship can be a tremendous support and can help them find their way through. Lou is a delightful heroine who never totally succumbs to the bright lights, but always maintains the common sense of her family and her own down to earth attitudes.


This really


is a wonderful book and fits in with those titles such as The Great Gatsby, Jeeves and Wooster and the Poirot novels of Agatha Christie. It is highly recommended for the upper end of secondary school. MP


Books for Keeps No.231 July 2018 31


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